First official picture of the Samsung Galaxy S4 apparently shows smaller form factor compared to S3

Samsung has posted the first official picture of the Samsung Galaxy S4 and while there’s not much to be seen, there are some pretty intriguing clues that can be found.

We did some image manipulation to bring out more details by adjusting colours. Not pretty at all but at least you can see the edges that were left in the dark in the original picture.

We compared the picture to a standard Galaxy S3 stock photo and aligned the “Samsung” logotype, which for the sake of simplicity, we assumed would still be of the same size.

This is a very important assumption as any changes in the size of the logotype would change the scale used and I cannot stress enough how pivotal that assumption is.

What observations can be made? Firstly, we can’t see any speaker grill on the S4, then there’s none of the sensors/front-facing cameras that adorn the top end of the facia. Could it be that the earpiece is hidden on the edge of the smartphone or even in the logotype?

Secondly, the device appears to be less wide than the S3 by about 3mm. The approximate width of the display is 55.3mm, which would mean, by extrapolation (and assuming that the display would be a full HD one) that its height would be around 98.3mm. Using Pythagoras theorem, this computes into a display diagonal of 4.44in (or 112.79mm) or a pixel density of 496ppi, higher than the rest of the competition but still short of the 500ppi we were expecting.

Lastly, we’re surprised by the distance between the Samsung logotype and the upper edge of the screen of the Galaxy S4; more than twice that of the existing Galaxy S3.